exacting and pretentious, and
uneducated in the worst sense, for they are ignorant how ignorant they
are, or even that they are ignorant at all.

Then there is a still more obvious, palpable, and impressive
circumstance. A man with ordinary means looks with alarm on the too
visible and too unbounded extravagance of the ladies from among whom he
is expected to take a partner. The thought of the apparel, of the
luxuries, of the attendants, of the restless moving about, to which they
have been accustomed, fills him with deep consternation. He might
perhaps deceive himself into thinking that he could get on very well
with an empty-minded woman, but he cannot forget the stern facts of
arithmetic, nor hoodwink himself as to what would be left out of his
income after he had paid for dresses, servants, household charges,
carriages, parties, opera-boxes, traveling, and all the rest.

Besides the flippancy of so many women, and the extravagance of most
women, arising from their inexperience of the trouble with which money
is made and of the importance of keeping it after it has been made,
there is something in the characteristics of modern social intercourse
which makes men of a certain temper intensely anxious to avoid a sort of
marriage which would, among other things, have the effect of committing
them more deeply to this kind of intercourse. Such men shrink with
affright from giving hostages to society for a more faithful compliance
with its most dismal exactions. To them there is nothing more
unendurable than the monotonous round of general hospitalities and
ceremonials, ludicrously misnamed pleasure. A detestation of wearisome
formalities does not imply any clownish or misanthropic reluctance to
remember that those who feel it live in a world with other people, and
that a thoroughly social life is the only just and full life.

But there is all the difference between a really social life and a
hollow phantasmic imitation of it. A person may have the pleasantest
possible circle of friends, and may like their society above all things.
This is one thing. But to have to mix much with numbers of thoroughly
indifferent people, and in a superficial, hollow way, is a very
different thing. Of course, men who take life just as it comes, who are
not very sedulous about making the most of it in their own way, and are
quite willing to do all that their neighbors do just because their
neighbors do it, find no annoyance in this. Men cast